Welcome to this cyberplace, set up as a space for news and reviews of A Gentleman of Pleasure… and occasional jottings about John Glassco. Five years have now passed since publication, and I've moved on to other projects, but I'm leaving this up with the thought that those drawn to Glassco's writing will find something of interest.

18 September 2011

Robert McAlmon's The Nightinghouls of Paris

Three pages from the manuscript of Robert McAlmon's The Nightinghouls of Paris. A roman à clef set in 1929 Montparnasse, it centres largely on Sudge Galbraith and Ross Campion, two Montreal boys modelled after Glassco and Graeme Taylor.

In 1947, McAlmon mailed the manuscript to Glassco. It was returned without comment, bringing their nineteen-year friendship to an abrupt end. Glassco was most disturbed by the frank portrayal of himself and his relationship with Taylor. The novel's publication would have been embarrassing, if not disastrous.

Glassco needn’t have worried about the novel’s appearance. In 1947, McAlmon’s career was already over; he would not live to see another title published. It wasn't until 2007, sixty years later, that The Nightinghouls of Paris was finally published by the University of Illinois Press. Edited with an Introduction by McAlmon's biographer Sanford J. Smoller, it is an invaluable document, and is recommended highly to anyone studying Glassco and his work.

The eighteenth of thirty posts focussing on images not found in A Gentleman of Pleasure.

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A writer, ghostwriter, écrivain public, literary historian and bibliophile, I'm the author of Character Parts: Who's Really Who in CanLit (Knopf, 2003), and A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Translator, Memoirist and Pornographer (McGill-Queen's, 2011; shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize). I've edited over a dozen books, including The Heart Accepts It All: Selected Letters of John Glassco (Véhicule, 2013) and George Fetherling's The Writing Life: Journals 1975-2005 (McGill-Queen's, 2013). I currently serve as series editor for Ricochet Books and am a contributing editor for Canadian Notes & Queries. My latest book is The Dusty Bookcase (Biblioasis, 2017), a collection of revised and expanded reviews first published here and elsewhere.

Black-leather dandy, and elegant, martini-sipping beat, John Glassco was a one-man, literary underground. Impeccable in style and provocative in intent, his pornography is poetic, his poetry is arty, but all his writing has the precision and grace of beautiful lies. Yet, his genius has gone too long unheralded and unsung in his native land. Bravo to Brian Busby, then, whose exhaustively researched, exquisitely written, and endlessly interesting biography reveals Glassco's vivid complexity, intricate deceptions, and the convoluted genesis of his deathless triumphs in memoir, translation, lyric, and, yes, his odes to the joys of womanly sadism and boyish masochism. Busby gives us a detailed portrait of a grand bon vivant and a singular intellectual, who was likely English Canada's most gifted, truly radical writer.

– George Elliott Clarke

In his own elegant prose and with a profound appreciation of his subject’s life and work, Brian Busby introduces us to the life, the times, and the writings of a man who was not merely a gentleman of letters and pleasure but also a fabulist of the first order. Busby’s treatment and analysis of Glassco’s best-known work, the controversial Memoirs of Montparnasse, should lay to rest any questions still surrounding its composition. Read this book too for an exceptional and intimate gaze into the life and times of a pioneering translator of Franco-Québécois writers into English; an award-winning poet; and a noteworthy author of literary pornography. All combine quite comfortably to make A Gentleman of Pleasure a tremendously good and satisfying read.

– Sheila Fischman

Probably the best literary biography ever to appear in Canada.

– Fraser Sutherland

No other work matches this one for comprehensiveness: Busby's research is meticulous and impressive, and he provides valuable, often corrective, information abut Glassco.

– Yuya Kiuchi, Choice

As this book's subtitle makes clear, Glassco dabbled in many literary forms (with varying degrees of success – the more he wrote about spanking, it seems, the better his sales), but he truly excelled at self-mythology. His Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970), much-praised for its truthful evocation of an epoch, is now recognized as a grossly fanciful exaggeration of his youthful European adventures. Brian Busby earns full marks – not just for being crazy enough to play Boswell to a compulsive liar prone to destroying his personal correspondence – but for having the skill (and research chops) to sculpt fibs and embellishments into an eminently readable portrait of a writer whose greatest creation, ultimately, was his own life.

– James Martin, McGill News

How do you write an accurate life of someone who lied for the fun of it? Busby is assiduous in tracking down the facts but sometimes he has to acknowledge that they do not carry him all the way to the truth. Never mind. A Gentleman of Pleasure is a thorough and thoroughly entertaining study of Canada's foremost literary charlatan and it is only appropriate if the reader is sometimes left wondering what's the truth and what's just truthiness.

– Daniel Francis, Geist

I imagine that Busby, like many other literary biographers, ended up with a much different book than the one he had in mind originally. As he gathered more and more detail (he is a master of research), he must have rethought his previous assumptions, coming to see Glassco as a terribly sad figure: someone at odds with his wealthy family, frequently broke or seriously constrained in various ways by what he called 'the two features of my psychosexuality, the fetishistic and the masochistic.' Yet in the process Busby proves himself most sympathetic as he goes about revivifying a complex and (in this instance) highly conflicted individual consciousness, which is what serious biographers aspire to do. What a yarn…

– George Fetherling, CNQ

If, at the end of this book, which so exhaustively lists Glassco's many crimes against love and literature, I am left with an appreciation for the man and artist, and a desire to read his 'memoirs,' I can only attribute it to Busby's tact and humanity as a biographer. He presents Glassco, a survivor of childhood abuse, as a three-dimensional person, with strengths and weaknesses, with his primary strengths being his prose and his charm.

– Anne Chudobiak, The Gazette

It is nothing less than thrilling - if I may use a word not often associated with Canadian literature - to have two excellent works on (and by) John Glassco appearing in the same year. Is this the (or, another) beginning of a Glassco revival? Let’s hope so. Brian Busby’s remarkably complete and very readable biography of a somewhat idiosyncratic man of letters brings to the fore Glassco’s many talents, on display not only in his celebrated (and notorious) Memoirs of Montparnasse but also for his less well-known (but equally important) work in the fields of poetry, translation, and pornography. Alongside Busby’s handsomely presented volume, Carmine Starnino [John Glassco and the Other Montreal] focuses on selections of Glassco’s poetic works, which he prefaces with a brilliant and concise introductory essay. For the reader new to Glassco - and to those unfamiliar with his other work—the two books will definitely reward and delight.